appropriate dd slideshow script

[james438]

What would be a good DD slide show script to use if I have a lot of images? For example if there are 100 or 200 images I would rather the user didn't have to wait for all of the images to load for the program to start running. Something where the image would load when or just before the next image is to be displayed sounds like what I am looking for.

Thanks

[jscheuer1]

Using a lot of images on a page is always a little tricky with or without a script. With the right script though, things can be workable in most cases.

I would suggest:

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex14/fadeinslideshow.htm

or:

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex14/swissarmy/index.htm

The first of which I believe does incremental preloads. The second one I know does - I wrote it.

But whatever you do, if there are a lot of images involved, you should resize them all to the minimum dimensions acceptable and optimize them to the lowest resolution and byte size you can live with. Reason being that if you do so the limitations imposed by bandwidth (which vary by user and are mostly beyond your control) will matter as little as possible for your page.

[james438]

Awesome, thanks. The images are resized, but as the number of images increases load time becomes an issue once again. I like both scripts you mentioned too.

[djr33]

Whenever you have that many images, it's probably a good idea to split up the gallery into a few pages. You could try using Ajax to load them when a user goes to the next "page" (ajax pagination), but that might get very complex to get everything working dynamically.
There's nothing wrong with a site that loads a new page every once in a while.

You could split it in a logical way, like by month, category, user or just at every 20th picture, etc.

[jscheuer1]

Yes. However, with incremental preload all that really matters is the byte size of the next image. Specifically whether or not it's of a small enough byte size to load while the user is viewing the current image. This depends primarily upon bandwidth and upon the interval between images. You cannot control the first, but can control the second. In my Swiss Army, the slide show will actually add to the delay preceding any image that isn't yet cached.